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OK, my initial comments on the NAO pandemic procurement report. Firstly, it’s a very strong and fair report, with plenty of detail and insight – very good work given the pressure NAO must have been under itself (staff, politics, time).
The VIP route for PPE was really good news for the firms who got onto it. They had a 10% chance of winning contracts – many for £100 million or more. Your chances if you weren’t on it were less than 1%. Who you know, not what you do.
That was clearly unfair and broke a fundamental principle of public procurement (and the regulations). Failure to track where VIP referrals came from in many cases (only half were noted) and lack of awareness or concern about conflicts of interest also leave a bad taste here.
Lack of documentation of why suppliers were chosen for contracts is unforgivable, given lack of competition and size of many contracts. (It broke the government’s own Cabinet Office guidance as well). The lack of clarity on the “due diligence” process is worrying too
We can speculate as to why it happened – incompetence? Arrogance? Lack of time to keep notes (with 450 people in the team, that doesn’t feel like a good excuse)? Or corruption of some sort? The suspicion of bribery of officials remains given this report.
Buying masks with the wrong specification would appear to be simply a very expensive mistake, only slightly excused by the time pressures.
The 3 non-PPE contracts let by the Cabinet Office examined don’t even have the PPE excuse of urgency. Contracts were also retrospective which is just rank bad procurement practice. Two suppliers also have potential conflict of interest issues. All in all, disgraceful.
No doubt that some of this was “corrupt” in sense of “degraded with unsound principles” or “putrid and rotten”. That doesn’t mean that individuals were receiving bribes. But eg. procurement people know that there really must be a robust justification for choosing suppliers
Hard to see that Gareth Rhys Williams can have any credibility with other departments now as Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, given he sits in Cabinet Office where some of the most egregious breaches of regulations and good practice took place. https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/?slide=1
